You've Gotta Hear This: Gifting Futures

As part of my non-Cycling ’74 life, I host a weekly radio program (RTQE*) which takes its name from an acronym based on one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies on my local Community Radio station. At this time of year, I have listeners (geolocal and otherwise) call me to inquire about my opinion as to great year-end stocking stuffer prezzies for their partners or their pals. Since doing community radio means that your listeners pay to keep you on the air, those inquiries are something I take very seriously, indeed – to the point that I do my “personal best of the year” list before the year is over in order to assist listeners with these questions. Since I’m working on that list right now (and it’s strictly personal rather having any claim to aesthetic discernment on my part), it occurs to me that, since one of the things that’s definitely going to make my list is a Max/MSP outing, perhaps I might aim you at two gifting choices for the holiday season – one of which uses Max, the other of which does not.

* Yes, my radio program does stream online when I'm on the air, and - as is the case with all streamed radio programs covered under the odious DMCA - is archived for two weeks. It might (or might not) be your idea of a good time – perhaps looking at a whole bunch of online playlists will help you decide. Think of it as Darwin Grosse’s insanely great podcast with multiple guests (and very little talking) each week.

Gift One: Autechre Live

Sean Booth and Rob Brown, who have labored mightily for years under the moniker Autechre, are often justifiably uneasy about being identified or tagged by the tools they use. But, as regularpatchgrovels on the Cycling ’74 website will readily attest, the world is full of people who are interested in their reputed use of Max/MSP to achieve their ends.

From what I’ve seen along the way over the years, here’s what I can tell you:

• Like any good artists, Messrs. Booth and Brown do not reduce to their tools (they've done quite a bit of their recorded work with nary a patcher window in sight), and it's offensive to imagine that they might. Creativity is always a dead-reckoning dialog between intention and instantiation, both of which matter.
  

• These two gentlemen understand the SimpleFM patch initially described in the MSP tutorials better than any humans in this arm of the spiral galaxy; if you’re interested in their ear for timbre, some serious woodshedding with that patch is in order.
  

• What makes them grovelworthy as performing artists has to do with the way they create generative control structures. This is good and bad news: It’s bad news because those patch grovels are going to doom you to Aristotelian mimesis forever. The good news in that your ear can actually be a guide in terms of thinking/imagining about how they do their work when they do use MSP, and provide you with the opportunity to patch based on what you imagine rather than what’s done – your mistakes or misunderstandings as you patch may prove more interesting than what you thought you wanted to learn (another way to say this refers to the very first Oblique Strategy: “Was it really a mistake?”).
  

My full-stop favorite Max-based releases of the year provide you with opportunities to listen carefully at the way a huge structure (performance) unfolds from start to finish. The Autechre-specific online shop located in the Warp Records Bleep site offers you the chance to snarf live performances (Krems, Nagano, Grafenhainichen, Dour, Katowice, Krakow, Brussels, Utrecht and Dublin, at the time of this writing) recorded over the last two years.

The performances' timbral resources are similar, but their forms vary widely over the course of the roughly hour-long sets - a growing list of opportunities to make your best and most potentially fruitful guesses about systems of control – each of which might change your patching life.

Oh yeah, they’re astounding listens, too.

Gift Two: Harry Bertoia's Sonambient Recordings

My second recommendation for gifting your friends (and this will be very good friends, indeed. Maybe even yourself, come to think of it) is quite different - a release of decidedly site-specific live recordings from a sculptor whose centenary of birth we celebrate this year. And the name is Harry rather than Max. Harry Bertoia.

I was chatting with an acquaintance this weekend about Autechre patch grovels and the much-anticipated box set release of Sonambient: Recordings of Harry Bertoia when my friend said something interesting to the effect that the work of Harry Bertoia and the Autechre work aren't all that far apart - They're both the result of careful exploration of simple sets of ideas, pursued quietly and in their own time by persons for whom individual works aren't necessarily the point - the works are instances of the refinement of their craft; the urge to copy or study the work (as useful as mimesis may be) will ultimately be frustrating, because what gives them their aesthetic wallop is embedded in the process of their creation. Food for thought.

Harry Bertoia departed from our midst in the 1970s, leaving a rich artistic legacy of everything from jewelry and monoprints to sculpture, whether modest in size or in the form of public works. It's quite possible that you've encountered some of his sculptural designs already and not known it - The beautifully designed chair that bears his name, among other designs that are still on sale a century after his birth. But he's of interest to us for something that directly resulted from his success as an industrial furniture designer - financial success freed him to concentrate on sculpture, particularly sculpture that made sound when actuated. Sonambient sculptures (as he termed them) constitute a large part is his ouput, and he recorded and released on a series of LPs in the 1970s that were far ahead of their time.

For years, recordings from the Sonambient series were catnip for crate-divers, who patiently hunted for the LPs they didn't have (my colleague Ben Bracken reminds me that Book Beat in Ann Arbor, MI [a store owned by Carey Loren of Destroy All Monsters fame, by the way] was legendary for having boxes of all the original releases. Ben is the only person I know who I'll wager has a complete set of the LPs, I'll bet), occasionally at usurious prices.

Harry personally recorded each one of them himself in his barn studio in Pennsylvania, turning on the recorder and moving among the collection of sculptures to improvise/create the performances (This Mobil Oil commercial, released shortly after Harry's death, shows him actuating some of his sculptures. There's a better video of his son Val performing on a wider range of the sculptures here). The Important Records box includes the complete set of Sonambient releases transferred from Harry's original tapes, and it's wonderful. You can hear a sample of those recordings here and here.

Finally, here's a filmed 1960s documentary on Harry's sculptural work that touches a bunch of the bases, by way of introduction (yes, I am a sucker for old documentary films, thanks for asking).

I'll close with three phrases from the documentary sums up why I think both of these recordings interest me:

Creative endeavor without possession.
Action without self-assertion.
Development without domination.

Happy holidays to you all.